Blue Data says their technology makes it possible to build 100 node Hadoop and Spark clusters in less than ten minutes, and get the same kind of on-premise Big Data as the huge cloud companies at a fraction of the cost.
Kumar Sreekanti, CEO and Founder of BlueData
Mountain View, CA-based startup BlueData has emerged from stealth with EPIC Enterprise, the industry’s first Big Data software to enable enterprises to create a self-service cloud experience on premise.
“We are redefining how enterprises consume big data, through a self-service Big Data cloud-like experience on premise,” said Kumar Sreekanti, CEO and Founder of BlueData. “Big Data does not mean big costs, or big changes to consumption models. It’s a VMware-like experience for Big Data.”
EPIC Enterprise is a software platform that organizations deploy on commodity hardware to create a Big Data Private Cloud. IT can also provision, manage and administer their Big Data infrastructure through a role-based web portal, which transforms the consumption experience. In addition, BlueData is also announcing the availability of EPIC One, a full-featured community edition, which allows users to experience the power of multi-app, multi-version instant clusters on a single physical node.
“The Big Data applications run on top of our platform,” Sreekanti said. “With EPIC you can go from thousands of mouse clicks to five to create a personal cluster to run Big Data applications.” It is possible to build 100 node Hadoop and Spark clusters in less than ten minutes, and get the same kind of on-premise Big Data as the huge cloud companies at a fraction of the cost.
Sreekanti, who was formerly VP of R&D at VMware, and VP of R&D at Akamai before that, highlighted three patent-pending technologies at the core of the EPIC platform. DataTap eliminates time-consuming data movement and data duplication by allowing you to leave data where it is. IOBoost provides application-aware caching and tiering to deliver extremely high performance. Finally, ElasticPlane enables self-service, multi-tenant clusters using hypervisor and next generation container technologies.
“Nobody else offers that particular solution today,” Sreekanti said, referring to ElasticPlane.
That ability to offer multi-tenant clusters makes EPIC well suited to the service provider and MSP markets,” Sreekanti said.
“Even within a single private cloud, multitenancy is a requirement because of data like HR and health that organizations don’t want exposed broadly,” he said. “But it also makes it valuable for the service provider market, and we are having conversations there.”
Sreekanti said the initial focus is on the enterprise, because it is the space with the most urgent need, but that this technology works for any size business that runs analytics.
“It’s not just for large enterprises, but enterprises of all sizes, even midmarket and SMBs,” he said. “It provides a cloud-like experience inside your firewall without having to move your data to a public cloud.”
How does the pricing compare to a public cloud? Sreekanti said that if you just run it for a few minutes a day, the public cloud will be cheaper, but if you run it 24/7, it’s more cost effective to do it in house this way. He also said that they are in the process of coming up with unique pricing models.
Additional functionality is planned to be added in subsequent releases. Today they support Openstack and KVM, but will be adding supporting for containers using Docker and other management techniques. Big Data projects supported include Hadoop 1.0, YARN, MapReduce, Hive, Pig, HBase, Impala and Spark.
“We also have a charge back built in so an IT organization or service provider knows who is consuming what, and we will integrate that as the first feature in the next release,” Sreekanti said.
BlueData comes out of the gate with several key technology partners, They are partnered with Cloudera and certified with Hortonworks and Databricks. Sreekanti also said they are working with a large number of hardware vendors although these are not being announced at this time.
For solution providers, Sreekanti sees three types of opportunities with BlueData. First is as a direct channel play in that massive part of the market outside the small number of named accounts that BlueData is pursuing directly. Second will be through the channels of hardware OEM partners, as Sreekanti said some of the server vendors are interested in opening up a Hadoop appliance. Third is the service provider market, where offerings will be powered by Blue Data.
